


we built this house on memories

by charleybradburies



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 1930s, 1940s, Amputation, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bletchley Park, British Military, Broken Engagement, Brother-Sister Relationships, Canon Disabled Character, Canon Timeline, Canonical Character Death, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Chance Meetings, Christian Character, Coincidences, Conversations, Drinking, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Engagement, Espionage, F/M, Family Loss, Female Friendship, Gender Roles, Grief/Mourning, Happy Ending, Headcanon, Hospitalization, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Hydra (Marvel), Injury, Injury Recovery, Late Night Conversations, Loss, Loss of Limbs, Love Stories, Major Character Injury, Male Friendship, Marriage Proposal, Medical Trauma, Military, Military Background, Military Backstory, Minor Character Death, Multi-Era, POV Multiple, Parallels, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Past Relationship(s), Period-Typical Sexism, Permanent Injury, Prayer, Questions, Season/Series 02 Spoilers, Soldiers, Spies & Secret Agents, Spoilers, Strategic Scientific Reserve, Surprises, Time Skips, Trauma, True Love, War, War Era, Women in the Military, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2018-05-18 08:16:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5911960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charleybradburies/pseuds/charleybradburies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’ll be brilliant at whatever she becomes, of course, no debate about that - but oh, Heavenly Father, Michael asks, if you got nothing else for me, no other prayer to answer, let her know how <i>damn</i> good a <i>spy</i> she could be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we built this house on memories

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "House of Memories" by Panic! at the Disco.
> 
> Peggy's middle name technically canon - spelt the way that my first name is spelt and thus my preferred spelling of the name, and likely the one I'll use unless and until we are explicitly shown her name in writing in canon source material.

Michael’s unit doesn’t stay long in Britain, only keeping stateside for about a month before shipping off farther east, focused on strength training and making friends with American troops stationed or staying over in Britain and Ireland. 

He has his favorite photograph of Peggy with him, like he always does, and carries it with him, emboldened by his baby sister’s figurative spirit but saddened by their inevitable dearth of interaction. He doesn’t talk about her much, because he knows how guys get when girls are being talked about, and sure, Peggy’s taken, but it still doesn’t sit well with him, even when the guys are his buddies.

He _does_ tell one of the American soldiers about her, though. 

Sousa, Daniel. Private First Class. One of the swellest fellows Michael’s worked with. Respectful almost to a fault, clever as a fox, stellar taste in whiskey. Got a little sister of his own, carries a photograph of her in his wallet, and a good one. Peggy’s a mess in Michael’s, laughing and cheering and muddy after a softball win back in year ten, but Jo’s is a professional portrait, with the teenaged girl with a nice, neat dress and her hair done up. Michael didn’t often see Peggy with her hair done up till the past couple years - since she’s had her mind set on becoming a woman, whatever the bloody hell that meant. (She _was_ a woman, wasn’t she? She was of age!) 

They don’t talk too much since they spend so much time working, and while they barely get past telling each other that their sisters don’t go by their full names but by nicknames - not Margaret but Peggy, and Jo was Josephine - and besides, they barely go by their own first names to begin with - they do trade addresses, just in case both of them make it out the other end of the war and end up able to ring each other or even meet up for a drink.

Michael ships out real quick, off to Poland. From what it sounds like when the British are leaving Sousa’s unit’ll be on the ground in Germany a month or two afterward. 

It doesn’t particularly matter. The two men never meet again, anyway. Michael doesn’t even make it to 1942. He bleeds out in a firefight, clenching the photo of his sister in his barely-mobile hand and thinking about the unsent letter he’s got for her, asking her to reconsider the SOE position. 

She’ll be brilliant at whatever she becomes, of course, no debate about that - but oh, Heavenly Father, Michael asks, if you got nothing else for me, no other prayer to answer, let her know how _damn_ good a _spy_ she could be.

+

She can’t get the words out of her head, even with the fifth pain pill she takes for the headache. If she’s being completely reasonable she’d suggest to herself that the whiskey isn’t helping, but she isn’t.

_“Don’t you think for a minute I’m gonna wait up for you like some sad dame, Margaret Carter.”_

_“Miss Carter, I speak for the British Armed Forces when I say that I am so terribly sorry for your loss.”_

She rings a few of her best Bletchley girls, and they all meet for drinks at the only Irish pub nearby - the only place they get served whiskey without some side-eye or other trouble. They only confirm what she already knows, but it’s always good to get another girl’s opinion or four. 

Her parents don’t agree with it at all, but concede that by this point they know better than to try to stop her once her mind's made up. 

She packs every important possession of hers into a suitcase, and leaves the engagement ring on her chest of drawers.

She spins her mind away from describing herself as the future Missus Margaret Wells faster than she expects. ‘Agent Carter’ fits like a tailor-made dress.

+

More than a whole month flies by in a blur of pain, unconsciousness, boredom, and confusion. Daniel’s only able to remind himself that time is passing at all by staring at the clock on the wall opposite him, but he has so much trouble focusing on it, just another white shape in a massive white room that perpetually smelt like blood.

The doctor tells him he’s been in the military hospital for six weeks when he first takes in the concept of ‘phantom pain’ - when he realizes that he’s half a leg less a man than he used to be. Even in pain, Daniel offers to help, to do _something_ , for God’s sake, but he can’t walk and they’re all trapped in by a blockade and he’s actually as useless as he feels. The doctor tells him to focus on the present, to not think about the future too hard, but how can he _not_ think about it when he _can’t fucking walk?_

Daniel thinks about the future. He thinks about it a lot. Thinks about the past a lot, too, thinks about baseball back home, and his baby sister Jo as a riveter, and wanting a family of his own he’ll probably never have, and how he’ll never take a girl dancing again and how his military career is over. 

The Axis keeps the hospital practically on lockdown until they’re barely able to function, until it smells more like death than blood, until the doctor’s sending nurses out to try to pinch bread or sewing needles from someplace. Daniel and everyone else is starting to give up again when the ‘raid’ happens - the liberation, the announcement from a jubilant American soldier that Captain _fucking_ America was here to save them all. Daniel hadn’t minded him before, even though some of the showier aspects were more gaudy than anything else, but now, even with his life on the man’s laundry list of rescues, it’s harder than ever to bear the fawning and foolishness of the American Obsession that he is. Daniel might have reason to thank him, but he never bothers to so much as shake his hand. 

One of Daniel’s nurses asks, and apparently relays to Rogers himself that Daniel simply had too much trouble getting around as it was, and of course the fellow understands, even though it wasn’t like he’d looked up every patient’s name and had people lining up for photographs. The ease with which he excuses people, Daniel and others, from doing things meant to honor him, does make him a little harder to dislike, though.

As soon as the blockade’s fully lifted, Daniel’s flown out to the hospital where his prosthetic is made. Learning to walk again is a grueling, tiring process, worse than combat training was, and he can never really help thinking that everything he’s expected to get out of his life is over and done with, but by the time he’s starting to manage to get around with a crutch a few months later, he has a job offer from an intelligence agency. 

“What the hell,” he eventually thinks. He _has_ always wanted to go to New York City, after all.

+

”I like to think you’d get on,” Peggy murmurs once, as she’s crying in the night about the war. Daniel’s come to accept that Rogers will always have some residual importance, but it always hurts to know she still aches about it.

“I almost met him once, you know,” he says, more to distract her than to talk about it.

“No, I - I didn’t know that.”

“Huh. Woulda thought I’d told you about that. Well, not much of a story, really. I was still...in recovery. Triage in Bastogne, behind German lines.”

“The blockade and - and the blizzard,” she realizes, and strangely enough, she cracks a smile, which turns to a chuckle a moment later before she nuzzles her head back into the crook of Daniel’s neck.

“What?”

“Nothing, just...makes it feel like he was looking after me. Making sure you survived, that there was - there’s someone to keep me warm, someone to love me, even though he chose...to deny himself that.”

Daniel tightens his arms around her, adjusting position just enough so that he can lean his head back down to his pillow, laying them both flat again. 

“And I will be forever grateful...for the chance to have lived long enough to _meet_ you, let alone to _love_ you.”

“Good,” she says, but though he can tell she’s trying to be forceful she’s far from it - unfortunately, in a manner that’s more concerning than cute. “I don’t want to _stop_ loving you.”

“Margaret Elisabeth Carter,” Daniel pulls back slightly to say, moving his freer hand to cup her cheek, “of all the things you are allowed to fear, the possibility that I will _ever_ stop loving you is _not_ among them.”

“Sure enough of that answer to marry me?”

Especially in hindsight Daniel realizes that his entire body reacts, heart speeding up and soul soaring and happiness lighting him on fire, but fittingly, he doesn’t think before he speaks.

“In a heartbeat,” he grins, and she kisses him abruptly; he lets himself melt into it, but resolves to ask her tomorrow why she felt the need to add the question mark.


End file.
